Between respectability and disgrace: schismogenesis and the regeneration of inequality, stigma and social exclusion in Limerick

The thesis examines cultural processes underpinning the emergence, institutionalisation and reproduction of class boundaries in Limerick city. The research aims to bring a new understanding to the contemporary context of the city’s urban regeneration programme. Acknowledging and recognising other contemporary studies of division and exclusion, the thesis creates a distinctive approach which focuses on uncovering the cultural roots of inequality, educational disadvantage, stigma and social exclusion and the dynamics of their social reproduction. Using Bateson’s concept of schismogenesis (1953), the thesis looks to the persistent, but fragmented culture of community and develops a heuristic ‘symbolic order of the city’. This is defined as “…a cultural structure, the meaning making aspect of hierarchy, the categorical structures of world understanding, the way Limerick people understand themselves, their local and larger world” (p. 37). This provides a very different departure point for exploring the basis for urban regeneration in Limerick (and everywhere). The central argument is that if we want to understand the present (multiple) crises in Limerick we need to understand the historical, anthropological and recursive processes underpinning ‘generalised patterns of rivalry and conflict’. In addition to exploring the historical roots of status and stigma in Limerick, the thesis explores the mythopoesis of persistent, recurrent narratives and labels that mark the boundaries of the city’s identities. The thesis examines the cultural and social function of ‘slagging’ as a vernacular and highly particularised form of ironic, ritualised and, often, ‘cruel’ medium of communication (often exclusion). This is combined with an etymology of the vocabulary of Limerick slang and its mythological base. By tracing the origins of many normalised patterns of Limerick speech ‘sayings’, which have long since forgotten their roots, the thesis demonstrates how they perform a significant contemporary function in maintaining and reinforcing symbolic mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion. The thesis combines historical and archival data with biographical interviews, ethnographic data married to a deep historical hermeneutic analysis of this political community.

A Higher Life : A Postcolonialist Analysis of Coetzee's Disgrace

J M Coetzee’s Disgrace deals with race and power in contemporary, post-colonial South Africa. This prize-winning novel is written after the country's first all-race elections, in 1994. It has therefore most often been analyzed as a representative for the writing of the new South Africa, where the social problems relating binary oppositions such as black – white, native – immigrant, powerless – powerful, are stressed. More specifically the shift of power within the above mentioned pairs is in focus. This is also the case for this essay, but instead of analyzing the realistic elements in the book it will examine the imaginary complexity of the opera Byron in Italy, which is created by the protagonist, David Lurie. This essay aims to widen the concept of “native” regarding post-colonial theory by looking at the peculiarity of Lurie’s situation; him being a representative of the white population in South Africa. By using post-colonial theory this essay aims at showing that Lurie can be seen as a white native, and that his process of writing the opera can be seen as symbolizing the evolutionary phases a colonized nation goes through in order to develop a national culture, as described by Franz Fanon.

Sexual abuse in 'Disgrace' and 'Cereus Blooms at Night': the case for hope

Abuse is rife in Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee and Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo. Sexual violence is in both narratives, part of their richly textured social, emotional and political worlds. Fiction involving various traumas seems bleak, almost hopeless, perhaps weighted by sadness. Yet both these novels, even through depictions of rupturing, disruptive rape, trigger a recognition of possibility and potential among characters and perhaps readers. It is in this open ended potential for betterment of some kind that hope lies. What is the nature of hope and to what extent is it present in these novels? In this paper, I explore the emotion of hope in relation to the notion of becoming as elaborated on by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari particularly in A Thousand Plateaus. They expound on Remy Chauvin‟s term “aparallel evolution” in relation to becoming (Deleuze and Guattari, 11). Deleuze also states that becoming is not a “phenomena of imitation or assimilation”. Rather, it is an encounter, “a double capture” (Deleuze and Parnet 2) between heterogeneous elements. There is no end or destination in becoming; it is constant change. I examine the transformative potential of becoming to elicit signs of hope in these novels. David Lurie, the self-absorbed womaniser and arguably rapist, becomes-dog by the end of Disgrace. How does this contribute to any sense of redemption and consequently hope? And how does hope emanate from the beaten, broken, brutally raped Mala Ramchandin in Cereus Blooms at Night? At heart, this paper is an acknowledgment of the unique relation literature has with life and the enriching insight that it may provide into the expression of hope.

Le siecle politique de Louis XIV : avec les pieces qui forment l'Histoire du siecle de M.F. de Voltaire & de ses Querelles avec Mrs. de Maupertuis & de la Beaumelle, suivies de la disgrace de ce fameux Poëte.

Mode of access: Internet.

Disgrace, Benang, and the search for benevolence

This Article does not have an abstract.

At the Core of the Matter : J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace from a psychoanalytical perspective

engelska

Archbishops’ chaplain behind bars at last

The sentencing of a self-confessed child sex offender and senior Brisbane Anglican priest Canon Barry Greaves in Brisbane District Court last Friday (April 24, 2009) is a significant event for many reasons and for many people. It is a significant event because Greaves was a priest at Boonah in the early 1980s when he committed the offences and because knowledge of his own sex offending against children failed to deter him from seeking and gaining high office in the Anglican Church. He accepted the position of being an Archbishop’s chaplain to Brisbane Archbishop Dr Peter Hollingworth in 1999. He stayed on as an Archbishop’s chaplain to the incoming Archbishop Dr Phillip Aspinall in 2002 and not even the disgrace of the sex scandal in the Brisbane Diocese resulted in a glimmer of guilt that maybe he was not an appropriate person to be providing pastoral care to other victims of sexual assault. Families of victims who were referred to Greaves for pastoral care are now flabbergasted by the double betrayal. “I went looking for comfort and now I discover I was confiding in a f***ing pedophile,” one woman said.

学习不良少年的污名效应研究

Stigma is defined as a sign of disgrace or discredit that sets a person apart from others. Stigmatized individuals had been significantly influenced by their group-based stigma. Through the methods of laboratory experiment and questionnaire surveys, the current study started with examining the attitudes of middle school students to the students with learning disabilities (LD), systemly explored the characteristics of perceived stigma and self-stigma of LD students, the mechanism that the influences of stigma on students with LD, and the mental control required to cope with the stigma. The results of the present studies had significant implications for the understanding of the LD phenomenon and the intervention of LD adolescents. The results indicate that: 1. Generally, middle school students had negative implicit attitude and negative explicit attitudes towards the LD students. The effect size of the phenomenon of this study is large. The LD students showed a more positive attitude than others on the explicit attitude measure; all students consistently had negative attitudes toward LD students on the implicit attitude indices, in addition, no group differences and gender differences were observed in the implicit attitude. 2. Eight hundred and seventy two students were surveyed to test the reliability and validity of the new developed perceived stigma scale and self-stigma scale. Both questionnaires showed sufficient content validity, construct validity, criterion-related validity and adequate internal consistency reliability. Then, both questionnaires were administered to student with high academic achievement (high achiever), students with middle academic achievement (middle achiever), and LD students. Results revealed that the LD students mildly stigmatized by the social culture. The LD students had more stigma perception and self-stigma than the middle achievers and high achievers. The results also indicated that there were more stigma perception and self-stigma for LD students in grade two than that of LD students in grade one and grade three; meanwhile, male LDstudent hade more stigma perception and self-stigma than female LD students in all grades. 3. A latent variable path analysis was conducted to investigate how the stigma affect the academic goals using the data collected from 186 LD students. The results suggested that the LD-related stigma did not have direct influence on academic goals. The LD-related stigma indirectly influenced the academic goals through mediating effects of self-stigma and academic efficacy. 4. Stereotype threat could have some influences on the relationship between the task feedback and self-esteem. The results of study using eighty-four LD students showed that: when the negative stereotype was not primed, the self-esteem of the LD students was significantly influenced by the feedback of the task: an enhance self-esteem following a positive feedback and a lower self-esteem following a negative feedback. When the negative stereotype was primed, there was no significantly difference between the positive feedback group and negative feedback group. All the results showed that priming the negative stereotype could weaken the influence of feedback to the self-esteem of LD students. 5. There was more cognitive and behavioral control when LD students tried to cope with the stigma by concealing negative academic achievement during an individual interview with an unfamilar expert. The LD students whose academic achievements could be concealed had more thought suppression and thought intrusion and reported more self-monitoring behavior than the participants in the other experimental conditions.

Monstrative acts and becoming-monster: on identity, bodies, and the feminine other

Using two examples of literary monsters, the Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Grendel’s Mother in Beowulf, this thesis demonstrates the bearing fictional identities have on “real” bodies, through an examination of two further literary texts, David Henry Hwang’s play, M. Butterfly (1986) and J. M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace (1999). Western definitions of Being have historically divided body and mind, favouring the mind as formative of subjective experience and denigrating the body as secondary and impure. This thesis demonstrates that this mind/body binary is symptomatic of the masculine ontological imperative to disown the body and its effects on Being, simultaneously ridding itself of the feminine it believes is its irrational opposite. Using recent feminist reviews of the canon, which emphasise the body’s importance to ontology and demonstrate the conceptual association between the feminine and the corporeal, this thesis links performative identity practices to theories of monstrosity, explaining how fictional qualities adhere to monstrous bodies by proposing a new theoretical category, the “monstrative.” The monstrative is a performative force that makes the Other into a living sign of Otherness; however, unlike earlier theories of Othering, the monstrative accounts for the Other’s being other to herself. This thesis also attempts to read the misrepresented body of the Other as a possible site for more empowered identity performances, where the monstrous “I” is interpreted as a potentially positive model for identity practice, through the conceptualisation of identity as a process of Becoming rather than Being. The transferal from a noun to a verb not only emphasises the performativity of identity, but also suggests fluidity and multiplicity in identity practice, which always already indicates a monstrosity at work. Thus, while monstrative acts constitute bodies as monstrous, Becoming-monster is an empathetic response to the Other’s monstrosity.

‘Wooden Man’? : Masculinities in the Work of J. M. Coetzee (Boyhood, Youth and Summertime)

In seeking to advance the possibility of justice, gender and postcolonial studies have argued for the importance of the study of masculinities, through the acknowledgment that a richer understanding of such gendered formations may provide the basis for recognition of the Other and that, left uncriticised, such formations may be continuously delineated by the reproduction of systems of domination. The current study finds as its object the representations of masculinities in J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002) and Summertime (2009). As works of transition in terms of Coetzee’s oeuvre - post-apartheid and post-Disgrace - the trilogy provides an account of the development of a man through several stages of life. While portraying the tensions of different geographical and cultural locations, such as apartheid South Africa and the London of the Sixties, the trilogy articulates the various norms that impact in the formation of gender, particularly of masculinities, through a complex system of power relations. The adherence to such norms is never linear, as the trilogy provides imaginative accounts of the contradictions that assist in the formulation of gender, depicting both the allure and the terror that constitute hegemonic masculinity. Located in the intersection of gender and postcolonial studies, the present study is based on the works by Raewyn Connell on masculinities. Animated by such a critical framework, the main research question of the present study is whether the trilogy advances a notion of masculinity that differs from the traditional rigid model, that is, whether there is resistance to hegemonic masculinity and what the spaces inhabited by the subaltern are. It is suggested that the trilogy presents the reader with instances of resistance to normative formulations of masculinity, by contrasting domination with the possibility of justice, and advancing an understanding of the often fatal consequences of gender norms to one’s sense of being in the world.

Recueil de documents pour servir à l'histoire du règne de Louis XIII et de la minorité de Louis XIV. Copies.

Contient : 1 Ministère du cardinal de Richelieu ; A « Observations politiques et militaires sur la vie et services de monsieur le cardinal duc de Richelieu » ; B Démêlés de Richelieu et de la reine Marie de Médicis ; 1 « Plaintes de la reine mere contre Mr le cardinal » ; 2 « Plaintes de la reine, mere du roy, contre madame de Combalet » ; 3 « Accommodement pretendu de la reine mere avec Mr le cardinal » ; 4 « Entrée de la reine, mere du roy, au conseil, depuis la disgrace de Mr le cardinal » ; 5 « Irreconciliation de la reine mere avec Mr le cardinal » ; 6 « Union de la reine, mere du roy, et de Monsieur » ; 7 « Union des deux reines » ; 8 « Marillacs » ; 9 « Le cardinal Berule » ; 10 « Creance que la reine mere a aux predictions » ; 11 « Cabale de Vautier avec Beringan et aultres » ; 12 « Mescontentement de la royne regnante contre Mr le cardinal » ; 13 « Accommodement de Monsieur avec Mr le cardinal » ; 14 « Retraicte de Monsieur et desseins de luy et de Mr de Lorraine » ; 15 « Separation de la royne mere » ; 16 « Mr de Guise » ; 17 « Que la disgrace de Mr le cardinal est arrivée par dessein concerté avec les estrangers et autres factieux » ; 2 Rivalité de la France et de l'Espagne (1620 à 1623, 1647) ; A « Affaire de la Valteline, ambassade de François de Bassompierre en Espagne, mort de Philippe III et traité de Madrid ; affaires du Palatinat et de la Toscane, de 1620 à 1623 ; 1 « Instruction pour Mr de Bassompierre, envoyé ambassadeur extraordinaire en Espagne par le roy LOUIS [XIII], sur le subject de la restitution de la Valteline », envahie par le duc de Feria, gouverneur de Milan, aux Grisons. Paris, 21 janvier 1621 ; 2 « Memoire du Sr DE BORSTEL, agent de Mr l'Electeur palatin [Frédéric V], pour joindre la presente instruction » contre l'envahissement du Palatinat par « le marquis Spinola » ; 3 « Memoire de la reyne » ANNE D'AUTRICHE, pour M. de Bassompierre, chargé de présenter ses compliments au roi d'Espagne Philippe III, son père, et de lui « tesmoigner la satisfaction qu'elle a de Mr le duc de Luynes » ; 4 « Sommaire des poinctz contenus en la lettre que le duc DE FERIA, gouverneur de Milan, a escripte, le 23 octobre 1620, au seigneur Alphonce Casal, ambassadeur d'Espagne, en Suisse, en responce de la sienne du 16 dudict mois, sur ce que le sieur Gueffier, ambassadeur du roy aux Grisons, lui a faict entendre touchant les affaires de la Valteline » ; 5 « Abscheid des deux ligues de la Cadde et dix droictures, pour la renonciation des nouvelles alliances aux Grisons... 8 novembre 1620 » ; 6 « Abregé des actes de la journée tenue à llantz et à Coire, pays des Grisons, depuis le 13 novembre » jusqu'au 1er décembre 1620 ; 7 « Articles formez par les deputez des trois ligues, au bon plaisir et ratification des conseilz et communes d'icelles, à Ilantz, le 16 novembre 1620 » ; 8 « Formulaire du compromis dressé par ceux de la Ligue Grise » ; 9 « Proposition faicte par Mr DE BASSOMPIERRE à Madrid, le lundy 22 mars 1621, devant les commissaires ordonnez pour l'ouyr » ; 10 « Replique de Mr DE BASSOMPIERRE sur la harangue de dom Baltazar de Zuniga, le 23 mars 1621 » ; 11 « Traicté entre le gouverneur de Milan et les ambassadeurs de la Ligue Grise. Du [9] janvier 1621 ». En italien ; 12 « Relation envoyée au roy [Louis XIII], le 30 mars 1621, de ce qui s'est passé depuis la maladie du roy » d'Espagne « Philippes [III] jusques à sa mort » ; 13 « Relation de ce qui s'est passé depuis le [31] mars jusques au 17 avril 1621, à Madrid » ; 14 « Memoire pour Florence », contre l'influence espagnole, durant la minorité du grand-duc Ferdinand II ; 15 « Traicté de Madrid », du 25 avril 1621 ; 16 « Pouvoir du roy catholique [PHILIPPE IV] au Srs regens Cuymo et secretaire Cerica », pour conclure en son nom ledit traité. Madrid, 14 avril 1621. Traduction ; 17 « Ligue entre le roy tres chrestien [Louis XIII], la Republique de Venise et Mr le duc de Savoye, pour le recouvrement de la Valteline, au mois de febvrier 1623 » ; 18 « Compromis particulier passé avec le precedent traicté de Madrid... Madrid, 15 avril 1621 » ; 19 « Relation de ce qui s'est passé à Madrid, depuis le 17 avril jusques au 10 may 1621 » ; 20 « Ratification du traicté de Madrid » par « LOUIS [XIII]... Au camp devant St Jean d'Angely, le [24] juin » 1621 ; 21 « Ratification du compromis » par le même. Même date ; B « Lettre d'un gentilhomme venitien, escripte à Munster, le deuxiesme avril mil six cens quarante six, à un sien ami à Thurin », pour montrer que « ny la France ne doibt vouloir la paix aux conditions » offertes par l'Espagne, « c'est à dire de laisser les choses en l'estat qu'elles se trouvent aujourd'hui, ny l'Espagne ne doibt diferer un seul moment à l'accepter » ; 3 Mariage de Henriette de France avec Charles Ier, roi d'Angleterre (1624 et 1625) ; 1 « Lettre du roy d'Angleterre... JACQUES [Ier]... à Mr le duc de Chevreuse,... D'Ashby, ce XXIIIIe juillet 1624 » ; 2 « Responce de Mr le duc DE CHEVREUSE,... CLAUDE DE LORRAINE,... au roy d'Angleterre » ; 3 « Lettre du prince de Galles... CHARLES... à Mr le duc de Chevreuse » ; 4 « Responce de Mr le duc DE CHEVREUSE » ; 5 Lettres patentes de « CHARLES [Ier], roy de la Grande Bretagne », nommant le duc de Chevreuse son représentant pour contracter en son nom mariage avec Henriette de France. Westminster, 11 avril 1625 ; 6 « Lettre du roy d'Angleterre... CHARLES [Ier], à Mr le duc de Chevreuse,... Rohitegale, ce VIIIe febvrier 1625 » ; 7 « Responce de Mr le duc DE CHEVREUSE » ; 4 Alliance du duc de Rohan avec les Anglais (1626 et 1627) ; 1 « Declaration de Mr le duc DE ROHAN, pair de France, contenant la justice des raisons et motifz qui l'ont obligé à implorer l'assistance du roy de la Grande Bretagne et prendre les armes pour la deffence des eglises reformées » de France. « 1627 » ; 2 « Lettre des ambassadeurs extraordinaires du roy de la Grande Bretagne [HOLLAND et CARLETON] à Mr le duc de Rohan, luy donnant toute asseurance de la part de Leur Majesté pour l'execution des choses promises au traicté de paix rendu à Nismes... De Paris, ce 7 febvrier 1626 » ; 3 « Acte des ambassadeurs extraordinaires du roy de la Grande Bretagne... Faict à Paris, le IIe jour de febvrier 1626 » ; 5 Minorité de Louis XIV (1647 et 1652) ; A Défense de l'autorité royale contre les empiétements de la cour de Rome : — « Discours de Mr TALON, advocat general, tenu en la grande chambre, le Xe may 1647, sur le subject des remarques faictes contre le decret de l'Inquisition touchant l'authorité de St Pierre et de St Paul, avec l'arrest du parlement intervenu ensuitte » ; B Démêlés de la cour et du parlement ; 1 « Harangue faicte par Mrs du parlement à Mr le duc d'Orleans » ; 2 « Harangue faicte par Mr le premier president à la royne »